Don’t blink or you might miss the leap second on Tuesday

The 2015 leap second is coming at midnight GMT (8pm ET).

The global Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS) based in France monitors the planet’s rotation and tweak time where necessary.

Members of the worldwide Telecommunications Union, which sets the world’s clocks, will meet later this year to decide whether to scrap leap seconds completely.

He told National Geographic magazine: “It’s a major interruption mostly because there are a lot of systems that aren’t prepared to handle the leap second correctly”.

Not everyone recognizes the leap second, although Apple does on its devices.

“Getting leap seconds wrong can cause loss of synchronization in communication networks, financial systems and many other applications which rely on precise timing”.

Tomorrow (Tuesday, 30.06.15) will be a longer day: one extra second longer.

If a leap second is not added every once in a while, there would be in 2000 years nearly an hour’s difference between UTC and the time taken by Earth for one rotation.

“As leap seconds are only announced a few months in advance this can’t be done automatically, you need manual intervention and verification to make sure things are done properly and there won’t be any mishaps in the process”.

In the meantime, enjoy that added second. The Earth’s rotation changes speeds on a daily basis, and it is actually slowly slowing down. Yet the average solar day (how long it takes the Earth to rotate) is about 86,400.002 seconds because the old gal is slowing down due to a gravitational free-for-all between Earth, the moon and the Sunday.

As a safeguard, US stock markets are ending some after-hours trading early.

Leap seconds were introduced in 1972 and were added at a rate of about once a year until 1999. Even Google was affected in 2005 after the leap second made some of its systems stop accepting any commands.

However, if that small discrepancy were to be repeated each day for the full day, it would add almost a second.